For graduate student Matthew Aghai attending conferences and doing fieldwork are just part of the educational process. These extra curricular activities cost money, which most students don’t have.
However, help exists.
The Graduate and Professional Student Association offers travel grants to full-time, Moscow-based graduate students, valued at up to $900 for international travel, $700 for national and $350 for local events (Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana).
“The travel award is a route for students to get some financial help to attend workshops on their field or conferences,” said Simon Uribe Convers, travel grant coordinator. “They can also visit other labs and museums. They can do field work. So they can pretty much use the money we give them for any academic purpose.”
Aghai, forest resources Master’s of Science candidate, was awarded a grant in September and is using it to attend the Society of American Foresters National Conference Nov. 2 to 6 in Honolulu. While in Hawaii, he plans to take a field tour of native trees and local forestry research.
“This is an event where quite a number of people — primarily foresters and those in related fields — gather to do technical sessions and scientific sessions, and also to discuss updates within the realm of forestry,” Aghai said.
Aghai said he had been chosen as a technical presenter at the conference.
The grants, which have been awarded since fall 1992, are funded using fees paid by full-time graduate students. A portion of these fees is allotted to GPSA, and 40 percent of GPSA’s budget is designated for travel grants. The 2011 travel grant budget was $34,000, amounting to nearly $5,700 per grant cycle.
Travis Hagey, an evolutionary ecology Ph.D. candidate, was awarded $490 for a conference in Charleston, S.C., by the Society of Integrative Comparative Biology the first week of January, where he will present a paper on gecko toe pads. He was also awarded a travel grant earlier this year to attend the Evolution Conference in Norman, Okla.
“Conferences are good for lots of tangible and intangible reasons,” Hagey said. “The most solid is you get to present your own work, and you get to show other professors, post-docs, other students, what you’ve done, what you’re thinking, where you’re going with your research. You get comments back, people ask you questions. Overall these conferences are really, really good at bouncing ideas around.”
Other benefits, Hagey said, occur after hours.
“You’re going out getting drinks with professors, or other students and post-docs, so a lot of networking happens,” Hagey said. “You’re starting to put names to faces, like ‘Oh yeah, I read your paper two weeks ago, it was on…’ So there’s kind of intangible value in meeting the people, talking to them … it’s easy to start collaborations that way.”
While the majority of award winners use the grant to attend conferences, some — such as evolutionary ecology Ph.D. candidate Simone Des Roches — use the money for field-work and research. Des Roches used her nearly $500 grant to travel to the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, where she has been documenting the development of lizards with certain variations.
“This travel grant went toward basically mileage, both the trip back, the driving back, and for travel between our apartment in Alamogordo and the field site, which we go to every day,” Des Roches said.